Link Dump Friday
June 19, 2009
Here at JIG, we know you take time out of your busy schedules of polishing your monocles, straightening your gold bullion, and walking your pedigreed teacup poodles to visit us. And we appreciate it! That's why we scour the web to bring you only the finest games about pandas, catapults, and gold coins that quack like ducks when you touch them. Be sure to put in a good word for us at the country club! We promise not to eat all the lobster tails this time. Honest!
Panda's BIG Adventure - Chart a course for adventure and poop jokes in this, the latest, greatest (and unfortunately shortest) game in the Panda series. Instead of sneaking your way past complex laser grids to steal diamonds, you'll be trying to figure out why the mummy doesn't want your shovelful of horse manure. It's a question for the ages! Fortunately, you have a tardis — I mean, portaloo to help solve it. 
Symphonic Bus Tour - This game is just like Sonic the Hedgehog. Only... instead of a hedgehog you have a bus with an overhead rack. And instead of going really fast, you actually have to carefully maneuver through portals, hills, and moving platforms. And instead of rings, you're carrying precious, precious band instruments. Hmmm... actually, this is nothing like Sonic at all! What crazy person would even suggest that it was? Sheesh!
Quest for Power - Quest for Power is what Peanuts would look like if it was set during the medieval times, and Charlie Brown had a catapult instead of an inferiority complex. Build your fortifications and conquer England as King Blockhead — I mean, Arthur.
Oran - When I was a little girl, I was once dared to spend the night alone down by Hangman's Pond in the Bonemarrow Forest. I saw things that night. Things that changed my life forever and left me with a terrible, burdensome knowledge. Anyway, to make a long story short, this is a platformer about collecting shining golden coins. Isn't that nice?
Hover Kart - Hmmm. There's something awfully familiar about this multiplayer racing game! Careen around the track collecting tokens and power-ups to capture first place! If somebody passes you, do what comes naturally. Namely, shoot 'em with a rocket! Trust us, you won't feel so bad about it the first time it happens to you. (Or the second... or the sixteenth... )
The description for Oran made me think there was some sinister secret, but in fact, no.
Arrrg must find all 9 Critters in Panda's worlds!! Only 6 so far...
Well Hover Cart has been done decently. Great to have in a back window if you're doing a lot of other stuff and only want a quick 5 min or less game round.
I give it 3.5/5, more if I keep coming back to it, but I think its only going to be a couple day thing. Like that you can upgrade the look and feel with the coins you pick up.
Needs a lot more items and a way to get more # of people in a match (I end up in lots of 2 people matches.) Levels have nothing to do with skill set.
Jacob,
I can't find more than 5 myself!
Here are the ones I know of:
2 in Medieval: one behind the herb stand, the other behind the toilet.
1 in Dark Ages: it's behind the brain and meat
1 in Egyptian: it pops up behind the far left coffin
1 in Pirate: it pops up behind the barrels where you get the gunpowder
I love your writing Dora. That Oran description earned five mushrooms.
I found one Critter in Prehistoric:
It popped up in the bushes at the top left, but I wasn't quick enough to click on it and I waited around but not long enough for it to reappear.
Found two more critters:
1 in Dark Ages: pops up behind the table
1 in Pirate Ship: pops up behind the steering wheel
That brought my total up to 8. I have no idea where the last one is.
Symphonic Bus Tour was absolutely amazing. Major props to the developer.
Quest fo Power is jolly good fun, but very buggy
I didn't find all the critters either but I did find the we seem to be missing:
It's in prehistoric, and it pops up on the left of the seed plant.
Thank you, Xadrian! :)
Also, regarding the critters: I'm not sure how they're scripted to appear. Sometimes leaving and returning to an area helps. Sometimes you have to sit and wait forever for them to reappear if you miss them. Sometimes certain ones never seem to show up at all. I guess the only way to get them all is a vigorous round of Voodoo Gaming. (Try stuff, see what stuff works, until it doesn't.)
Symphonic Bus Tour is the silliest game I've played in a long while - but silly in a good way.
@MickGJ: Indeed. Nothing's more irritating than watching your men have a clear field to go after the king, but getting stuck on some invisible bug.
No bugs for me in Quest to Power, but I found the unskippable text and help pop-ups before battle rather annoying, and the fact that once the enemy archers are defeated it's only a matter of gold collection (and perhaps archer defense set-up, but that's more or less still gold collection) before you can knightspam your way to victory. It'd have been more interesting if there was differences in terrain between countries, differences in troop strength/types between countries, or if there were more done with the gravity effects (I would have liked it if, say, you had the chance to kill people by knocking out blocks in a structure underneath/above them). Overall it seems like it has decent ideas as well as a solid game concept but it could really use some polish (the spelling errors make this flaw stand out; I can't understand why some people don't use spellcheckers for their games at least).
Oh nuts, I forgot to mention something else Quest to Power could really use: a way to both shoot at the same velocity *without* having to reset the blasted thing by hand, and a way to make minor adjustments to current velocity. Not having either of those things when your cannon is stationary and the game is real-time really sucks.
@BDR: The bug I saw was that my troops would run into some glitch left behind by destroyed defenses, and they wouldn't be able to go past it. So, I'd have to restart the battle.
Oh, and I beat the game using only rocks in the catapult, and only swordsmen for troops. I found spamming them to be a lot more effective than spending a lot more gold on the advanced troops. So much for 7 enemies with different strategies.
And the unskippable text bothered me too, but it's only two lines per battle. Not too bad.
I found the text to be grating because on average it took somewhere between one and two seconds to get each letter out, and while the messages were short it meant I had to wait about a minute or two for them to shut up before I could get to the actual, decently fun business of slaying.
Swordsmen spam, eh? Well, you do get 2.5x the troops you would with knights, and once they're stacked the same effect takes place, I guess. What's too bad is that there *are* noticeable differences in effectiveness when comparing smaller troop counts, but that there wasn't enough of a difference to make spamming a single type of troop a bad idea. I might have done the same thing if it was easier to aim the catapult.
How do get Panda past the pirate?
BIG Adventure was my first experience with the Panda series. It was cool. I liked the funny banter from the bear. I played Tactical Sniper 2 right afterward but it didn't have the same sense of humor. Any other recommendations?
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one running into that dang "invisible barrier" bug on Q2P.
That could be an entertaining bit of nonsense if they'd tweak it just a little. Being able to repeat shots with the catapult would indeed be toward the top of the list.
Level 10 in Q2P is just impossible...
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